A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly [22]
“Surely you jest, sir.” The fiddler grinned, and drained the last of his second bottle of champagne. “Though I’d trade a week’s worth of opium to see what the Glutton would wear to one of these balls.”
“What I’d trade for,” remarked January, beginning to sort through his music and his notes for which tableau would be first, “is to know where they could have gone for an hour and a half. The building’s filled. If Peralta Père and Phrasie Dreuze are that puzzled, it’s got to mean they’ve asked in the courtyard and the gambling rooms whether anyone saw the two of them leave.” He reached up and took the empty bottle from Hannibal’s unsteady grasp.
“Easy,” said Hannibal. “They could have gone through the passageway to the Théâtre. Those boxes above the stage are curtained. Angelique’s white enough to pass. It’s not easy to tup a woman in a gown like that—twelve petticoats at the least, not to speak of the wings—in a box, but it can be done, if you don’t mind leg cramps.”
“Peralta would know that,” pointed out January.
“And there’s lot o’ competition for them boxes,” added Uncle Bichet, who had been following the entire intrigue with interest.
Minou strode over to them from the direction of the lobby doors, Agnes Pellicot at her heels, like a pair of infuriated daffodils. January saw both of them look automatically in the direction of Euphrasie Dreuze, seated in the triple bank of spindly gilt chaperones’ chairs with two of her cronies, fanning herself with what looked like an acre of ostrich plumes and watching the archways into the lobby with a wild and distracted eye.
“I have done what I can,” announced Agnes, her protuberant brown eyes flashing grimly. “Whore and bitch she might be, but she can fix hair. How such a woman could have been so …” She gave up with a gesture. “This is the big chance for Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose to be seen, to be admired at their best. If that conceited light-skirt doesn’t turn up …”
“I’ll move her tableau to last.” January shifted the Rossini aria he’d arranged as Angelique’s music in behind the Mozart dances that would usher in the Harîm.
“Don’t you dare!” cried a masked woman in a red-and-gold hashish dream of a Sultana costume. Her fantasia of dyed ostrich plumes tossed like storm clouds as she shook her head and shed a faint snowfall of shreds. “We’re on last. It serves her right if she misses her place.”
“Rachelle, of course if she shows up after you go on, we’ll put her on last,” said Minou coaxingly. “Think how unfair it would be to punish Emilie and Clemence and the two Maries. And where is Clemence?”
“I think she left when Galen did,” put in Marie-Rose. “Iphègénie’s aunt saw someone wearing that gray-green dress in the courtyard.”
“Tell you what,” said January, as the Sultana Rachelle’s bronze mouth puckered dangerously. “We’ll do that mazurka as an extra, to give everybody a little more time. Minou, you checked back on the parlor lately? She’s got to go back there one time or another if she’s going to fix those wings of hers. It’s the only place where she’d have room to work.”
“Hussy,” whispered Agnes Pellicot, her face like a hurricane sky. “Bandeuse! Coming to the ball like this, two months or less after Arnaud Trepagier is in his tomb, to see what else she can catch! If she’d had any decency she would have left the tableau, turned her position in it over to someone else! She can’t be needing money. After all he gave her, the jewels he lavished on her, slaves, a house fit for royalty, horses and a carriage, even! You saw those pearls and emeralds she had about her neck! He’d ride in from his plantation every night to be with her, even took her to the opera … fie!”
She stormed out into the lobby again in wrath.
“Dare one infer,” murmured Hannibal, turning over a page of the mazurka, “that Mama had some plans for Peralta Fils and the fair Marie-Rose?”
“Sounds like it,” agreed January philosophically. “Shall we?”
The brisk dance was entering its third variation when Minou reappeared